German Mothers and the Year 2031

Until 1975 German mothers did not pass on citizenship to children born in wedlock, only German fathers did. To address historic gender discrimination in citizenship practices Germany has defined a declaration process called Staatsangehörigkeit § 5. I wrote about our experience with this process, which we completed in 2023.

In the 20th century several million Germans emigrated to the United States. Staatsangehörigkeit § 5 is applicable to a very large number of their descendants today. From a post on r/GermanCitizenship about an April 2025 visit to the German Consulate:

The caseload has increased exponentially in the past 4 months. He said that aside from all the appointments each day, they get between 80 and 90 inquiries a day in the Chicago office alone.

The Staatsangehörigkeit § 5 process will be open for ten years. Having started in August 2021, declarations will be accepted until August 2031. The current wait time in the queue to be processed is about 2.5 years, and is likely to grow with the number of Americans now applying.

If you were born to a German mother prior to 1975 and you'd consider this declaration of German citizenship, I'd advise starting on it soon.

Coal Mining Policies

New coal policies are invariably announced in front of a group of workers wearing hard hats with lights affixed, and often in Pennsylvania for good measure. One might assume the mining profession is a huge economic force and under constant threat which must be fended off to preserve families and livelihoods.

As a profession, coal mining employs about 40,000 people in the US.

Source: FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data).

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Construction Management requires similar levels of education and experience and according to employment statistics enjoys a similar pay scale. There are 10x to 20x more Contruction Managers in the US.

Source: FRED (Federal Reserve Economic Data).

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Coal policies are not driven by concern for workers. Coal policies are driven by concern for fossil fuel profits, which have only been made possible by externalizing the cost of the damage to human health and acceleration of global warming.

RSS Feed Likely to Break

Over a decade ago I configured this Google Blogger site to use FeedBurner. This blog never generated ad revenue and I turned ad insertion off, but left the feed still going through FeedBurner.

I'm making progress in moving the blog off of Google Blogger. I am actively trying to reduce my use of big tech companies, limiting them to easily-replaced commodified services wherever possible. I have a Jekyll site working locally, with all existing posts and images imported. I expect to serve the generated static site from somewhere like GitHub Pages or Cloudflare Pages so as to not operate a public-facing site myself, but retain the content and publishing infrastructure locally. The static hosting can be moved easily.

However: I expect the RSS feed will break, with a discontiguous update making it look like more than 400 posts have suddenly published. The Jekyll site will not generate an identical feed to Google Blogger. I also don't intend to use FeedBurner with the new site, as Google began shuttering the service several years ago.

Looking at the feed today, it is three posts behind. I don't know why, but I guess I'm heartened that it is not more. I'm posting this now in hopes that it will be published to any remaining subscribers of the RSS feed before the changeover happens.

Farewell, Google Charts API

Nearly 14 years ago I wrote a joke post about the Holtzmann Shields from Frank Herbert's Dune, complete with impressive-looking but nonsense equations like this one:

That equation was created using LaTeX:

T = \frac{(0.09\frac{m}{sec})^2(0.0289644\frac{kg}{mol})}{(3)(8.3145\frac{m^2\cdot kg}{sec^2\cdot mol\cdot K})}

 

At the time the post was written in 2011, Google offered a Charts API which would accept URL-encoded LaTeX and render it on the fly. The original posting from back then just embedded the Charts API URL as the source for the image, confident that Google would supply a suitable PNG:

https://chart.googleapis.com/chart?chs=239x83&cht=tx&chl=%0AT%20%3D%20%5Cfrac%7B(0.09%5Cfrac%7Bm%7D%7Bsec%7D)%5E2(0.0289644%5Cfrac%7Bkg%7D%7Bmol%7D)%7D%7B(3)(8.3145%5Cfrac%7Bm%5E2%5Ccdot%20kg%7D%7Bsec%5E2%5Ccdot%20mol%5Ccdot%20K%7D)%7D%0A

One can see the LaTeX code in the `chl` parameter.

 

The joke post turned into a joke on me: Google announced the deprecation of the Charts API the following year, and turned it off altogether in 2019. My post from 2011 has been broken for almost 6 years, without me knowing.

I am currently endeavoring to reduce my use of Big Tech services, turning to alternatives over which I have more control. Importing that 2011 post into Jekyll repeatedly failed because the image link was broken. I was able to recover the original LaTeX from the URLs to fix the old post, by generating PNGs.

I think this reinforces the desire to not depend upon Big Tech. Google kills services every day, especially ones like the Charts API which didn't have their own monetization path.

Preparing for Offsite Backup

For many years, too many years, my family computer backup plan was an aging Apple Airport Time Capsule paired with the fervent hope that nothing would ever fail. That worked pretty well in that we haven't lost anything important, but Backup Theater is honestly worse than just admitting there is no real backup.

Last year I decided that Adulting should include ensuring that family data remains safe and the kids don't lose schoolwork, or the custom Doom WADs they've developed, or what have you. The Adulting Plan for Backups consists of:

• Android and iOS devices should be backed up somewhere outside of the home.
• Windows and macOS laptops should be backed up somewhere outside of the home.
• Proxmox VMs and LXCs should be backed up somewhere outside of the home.

Repetative and boring, perhaps, but that is how a backup plan should be: replicated and safe.

 

Android and iOS

The mobile devices were simplest: they already backed themselves up, Android to Google Drive and iOS to iCloud. Downloading all iCloud photos to immich allowed us to drop to a less expensive iCloud+ storage plan while still using it for device backups.

One downside of using the mechanisms which Google and Apple provide is that the backups are not encrypted from outside access. Google and Apple can access the contents of the device backups. I hope to come back to re-examine these backup plans in the future with something we have more control over.

 

Windows and macOS

After some searching, we paid for Arq Backup Premium, which provides one license for each of our five laptops. Each laptop is configured to back itself up twice:

1. To the cloud storage which Arq Premium provides.
2. Using SFTP over Tailscale to the fileserver within our home.

The backup files for all of the laptops together come to a bit over 800GB, nicely fitting within the 1TB of Google Cloud storage from Arq Premium. The backups are encrypted using a key which only we have, neither Arq nor Google can read the contents.

 

Proxmox

The Proxmox server within the home has 10 terabytes of ZFS storage. It provides the SFTP backup which the laptops are configured to reach via Tailscale, and it backs up its own VMs and LXCs to ZFS using vzdump. I'm working on offsite replication for this and might post again when that is done.